Repo Men

Jimmie Brockman was working as a warehouse supervisor in Kansas City, Kansas, when his fifteen-year-old son called to say he’d found a car he wanted to buy.

The teenager said he had seen an ad in the Thrifty Nickel for Neil’s Finance Plaza that promised “Just $59 down and you drive away.” But the Brockmans’ car purchase in February 2000 wasn’t nearly that easy.

Brockman expects to face the dealership in court for a second time this August.

When Brockman and his son were car shopping, he thought of Neil’s Finance Plaza as just another car dealership — despite the fact that its advertising clearly targets consumers in dire financial situations. In late-night TV commercials, folks who appear to have led hard lives praise Neil’s for putting them in cars when no one else would. An ad in the Yellow Pages proclaims “WE FINANCE” and promises incredibly low down payments. The dealership also sells Christianity — on the car lot, salespeople comfort distressed customers by telling them God will provide for them. The bottom of the Yellow Pages ad reads, “We Thank The Lord Jesus For Allowing Our Business To Prosper: To Him Be The Glory!”

Brockman’s son, Marcus, was weeks away from his birthday and had lined up an after-school job at a Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlor. He would make just enough to pay for his own wheels.

After work, Brockman drove to the dealership on Bannister Road. There, Marcus showed him a 1993 Pontiac Grand Am with more than 100,000 miles on it.

Brockman could have been a more wary shopper. But he says he was exhausted from all the overtime at his job. After talking payments with a sales manager, he said OK. He figured his son could afford $120 every two weeks.

A Neil’s Finance Plaza employee ushered Brockman into an office, produced reams of paperwork and pressured him to sign quickly. “She told me I could read it another time, later,” Brockman would later testify in court. He closed the deal, then stuck the paperwork in the glove box.

When he did read the documents, Brockman was stunned. He knew that the car’s Kelley Blue Book value was about $4,500, but the documents showed a purchase price of double that — $9,395. With his $100 down payment and a 19 percent interest rate, Brockman was going to end up paying $13,475 for a car that would probably break down in a couple of years.

Since the dealership hadn’t signed over the title to him, Brockman took the car back, offering to pay fair market price. The dealership refused, so he signed a release, left the car and figured that would be the end of his interaction with Neil’s.

A few months later, Brockman was at work when a man served him with legal papers and said, “You’re being sued by Regency Financial Corporation” — the financing arm of Neil’s.

The breach-of-contract lawsuit claimed that Brockman owed Regency $4,712. The company had been able to “sell” the car back to Neil’s, but, according to its lawsuit, “The proceeds of the sale were insufficient.” Regency threatened to damage Brockman’s credit and garnish his wages.

Jackson County Court records show that Neil’s has filed more than 2,000 such lawsuits in the past five years.

Brockman’s lawyer, Dale Irwin, characterizes Neil’s Finance Plaza as a “repossession mill.” There, previously repossessed cars get a stock number that includes an R followed by the number of times the car has been taken back from customers. Irwin says it’s common to see cars that have been cycled through the lot four or five times.

[page]

Court documents show that Neil’s Finance Plaza consists of two companies: Finance Plaza Inc., owned by Neil Erisman; and Regency Financial Corporation, owned by Tom Moore. In response to phone messages left for Erisman and Moore, a Regency spokesman said the company would not comment. But according to court documents, Finance Plaza buys cars cheaply at auction and sells them to consumers for at least double the auction price. Regency finances the purchases, usually at an interest rate of 18 percent or higher.

Sometimes consumers agree to pay far too much for a car because they have no other choice. “Since we don’t have mass transit that’s worth much in this city, you need a car to get to where the jobs are,” Irwin says. “It’s pretty much a necessity if you want to support your family and eat.”

Most people Regency sues can’t afford a lawyer. After Regency sued Brockman in July 2000, Brockman appeared in court alone twice before he hired Irwin. “I was real embarrassed and real nervous because I’d never been into a courtroom before,” Brockman later testified. After Brockman hired Irwin in November 2000 and countersued for fraud and malicious prosecution, Regency dropped its lawsuit against Brockman.

But Brockman did not drop his countersuit. Regency’s defense lawyer, Charles Weedman, later admitted in court that the company never should have sued Brockman. Regency only did so, the attorney said, because its lawyers didn’t know that Brockman had “just kind of voluntarily brought the car back.” A jury decided that the company had harmed Brockman by improperly — and maliciously — suing him, and awarded Brockman $30,000 in punitive damages. But a judge ruled that the company should pay Brockman only $1,000 for actual losses he had suffered. Brockman is asking the Missouri Court of Appeals to uphold the punitive-damages award.

In court, Irwin presented evidence that Regency and Neil’s regularly failed to complete proper title work on the cars they shuffled back and forth, making those “sales” void.

At the time, Regency estimated it brought in about $200,000 a month in car payments and about $30,000 a month in judgments the company had won against consumers — money that almost always came from garnished wages. The company employs a full-time attorney, Steve Coffin, whose only job is to sue customers for breach of contract. He files at least twenty such lawsuits a month.

Right now, hundreds of customers from Jackson, Wyandotte and surrounding counties are facing those lawsuits. Each suit alleges that the customer purchased a car through Regency, then “failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the contract.” And hundreds of area employers are garnishing their employees’ wages to comply with court-ordered judgments in favor of Regency.

But Neil’s stays in business because there’s a pool of customers who don’t have the cash to buy a used car outright and have such bad credit that no one else will offer them an auto loan. Some of Neil’s customers have been turned away at other dealerships who claim to finance anyone.

Buying a car at Neil’s just adds to many customers’ financial woes. Court records show that Neil’s gets most of its cars at auction — where other dealers often unload trade-ins with high mileage or wreck damage. Chances are, the cars will need costly repairs or break down before they’re paid off.

One customer, Sherry Sievers, bought a car from Neil’s in 2000 and within months had to spend $1,500 to repair the transmission. The engine died a few months later. Stuck with a no-good car and high payments to Neil’s, Sievers, a customer service clerk who didn’t make much money, had no option but to return the car. It showed up on her credit report as a repossession.

[page]

“They target people who are down-and-out, especially people who have just gotten divorced or have medical bills or maybe have overextended themselves,” Irwin says. “In many cases, the people wind up even worse off than they were before.”

In court, Weedman accused Brockman of being greedy. But Brockman says the money isn’t an issue. “I just want to let them know you can’t just run over poor people.”